This Week in CFD

classic-blueThe most spectacular post of the week is ANSYS’ announcement of the winners of their annual hall of fame competition. You really need to check out the fantastic simulations submitted by the winners and finalists. There are also a lot of conference announcements (perhaps normal for the beginning of the year) and 3D printing and scientific visualization news. Regarding the latter, the image to the right is a tribute to Pantone’s color of the year for 2020: Classic Blue.

Events

ansys-cardio

ANSYS Hall of Fame 2020 competition winner in the academic division, University of Rome, did a cardiovascular simulation with moving boundaries. This was my favorite. MUST SEE the other winners and finalists here. This competition always produces some spectacular results. Image is a screen capture of a video from ansys.com.

CFD for…

Colors & Visualization

genesis4321

Thomas Lin Pederson, Genesis. Done in R. Looks “fluidic” to me. One of the best visualization projects in the article above. Image from Pederson’s website.

The Cloud

  • vScaler offers a cloud-based CFD solution.
  • “CFD happens to be one of our largest workloads for for CPU at Nimbix.”
  • OnScale announced a “pay as you go” SaaS model for simulation in the cloud.

Software

  • Simcenter 3D 2020.1 was released.
  • VirtusAero supports the US3D CFD code and offers their STABL codes for hypersonic boundary layers. [This company has been around since 2015 but I just learned about them recently.]
  • CADbro. [Yes, that’s the real name. CAD. Bro. Ladies, how do you feel about that?] Software for viewing and collaborating with 3D CAD data.
  • Eddy3d computes “airflow and microclimate simulations for Rhino and Grasshopper.”

3D Scanning and Printing

  • It seems that there’s more than one way to 3D print something and the 3D printing parameters have a strong effect on the part’s strength and other attributes. Hence the need for “intelligent slicing” as described in this article from Teton Simulation.
  • If you have a 3D scan of an organic form and want to convert it to CAD, a partnership between Thor3D and nPowerSoftware is working on this problem.
KVS_QuickSurface__1.0_FW2_

Example of KVS QuickSurface for working with mesh-based, point cloud, 3D scan data. Image from develop3d.com.

Miscellaneous

Mapping Into the Plane

Sarah Morris is a prolific artist whose work covers film sculpture, painting and more. Many of her paintings are abstractions of vibrant, urban landscapes flattened into the picture plane. The term topology is used when discussing her work which further draws me toward an analogy with mesh generation whereby a complex mesh in 3D is unfolded into a 2D mapping. That’s demonstrated in her painting Rockhopper shown below. The cityscape motif is readily apparent but so is a mesh’s topology.

Some have drawn comparisons with Frank Stella’s work, especially the color palette. And Stella’s works were definitely inspired by architecture and the urban environments in which he lived. But Stella said that you’re always trying to paint the third dimension which is where Morris’ work truly excels.

Sarah-Morris-Origami

Sarah Morris, Rockhopper [Origami], 2009. Image from artist’s website. See links above.

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